This book tries, and for that alone, I'll give it an extra star. The author obviously has the best of intentions, but unfortunately, the effort doesn't translate into a novel that's readable. The characters are not recognizable human beings- they make June Cleaver seem like a complex, multi-faceted character. What's worse, there's no real theology that goes any deeper than, "God is good, you should worship Him." That's great, but when I read a book like this, I'm hoping to gain some new insight about both myself and my relationship to God. At the very least, I'm looking for a good story. There's none of that to be found here. Anyone looking for a novel about the Endtimes that succeeds where Meier's novel fails should check out We All Fall Down, by Brian Caldwell. It's insightful, enthraling, and will stick with you for months. Meier tries hard in this series, and doubtlessly has the best of intentions, but in all four of these books, his good intentions simply pave the way to a literary hell.

This is not a great book but I've got to give Paul Meier A LOT of credit for the attempt. I read just about every novel on biblical prophecy that comes out, and this is the only one I know of that takes that little bit of prophecy that exists about the time of the Millennial Kingdom of Christ and expands it into a full novel. So even though, like I said, it's not a great book, I recommend it. As for the period leading up to the Millennial Kingdom, I recommend THE CHRIST CLONE TRILOGY by James BeauSeigneur.

This book, I think, is excellent! To my knowledge, there is no other piece of Christian fiction that deals with the events taking place at the end of the Millennial Reign. Most authors, when writing in the field of Revelation, stop at Armageddon and the Second Coming. Paul Meier and Robert Wise, now my two favorite authors, are giving us a peek at what it might be like. Simply, it is, I suppose, just a cool book. Worshippers of the ancient "omnipotent" god Marduk tap into demonic power, an invasion of Jerusalem is planned, and at the end, Satan and his fallen angels are cast into the Abyss! "The Fourth Millennium" is a must-read!

Lurching from one great American university to another, spouting bile without any semblance of wit or craft, Finebaum here hits rock bottom by attacking the nation's grandest institution of higher learning. Message to the "alum" a few spaces below me: No Duke grad would ever commit such flagrant grammatical errors.

Yes, I am one of the many who would like nothing better than to punch most Duke graduates in the face. This book allow me to do something even better - laugh in their faces.

And to the... who commented that "no Duke alum would make grammatical errors", just because someone went to a school Duke doesn't automatically mean that they can write well (witnessing first-hand one of my colleagues who went to Harvard and can't spell to save his life...)

First of all kudos to the author. The research and leg work that was done for this novel was well worth the time. I went to Duke for 7 years, and I gotta tell you, i felt all 303 items. I later transferred to Coppin State in Baltimore and actually made worse grades. Thats life I guess. Once again kudos.

Those reviewers who gave this book five stars are just bitter because they applied to U of M and didn't get accepted. Those of us who did go to U of M aren't offended by your comments, we know we went to the better school and that you are just jealous.

I found this book to be quite funny. Oh, and by the way, Michigan isn't that hard to get into, buddy! A 2.5 will do it.

Well, Ok, so we won the Title, and didn't share it, and it's not Bo beat Woody. Oh ya, nice book too!

TERRIBLE book! I have no respect for the authors. Even in 3rd edition, there is a mistake on about every other page and some of the formulas are even printed wrong! They keep a known error page on the web (bad) but there are many more (even worse).
The book is incredibly difficult to use because there are very few examples and of the few examples many steps are dropped and does not explain clearly where the formulas came from. As for the problems in the book, besides the fact that the answers in the back are often wrong, the authors often require formulas not mentioned in that particular section and sometimes not even in the chapter or the book itself! As for the text of the book, every chapter includes too much chatter on the background of the discovery and not enough words explaining the concepts themselves.
The worst book I have used and several students agree. Physics is hard but these guys make it harder. My advice: get a book from a good publisher with authors from good universities.

This textbook is extremely difficult to follow and doesn't flow very well. I had a difficult time trying to understand the concepts the author was trying to make without having to read it several times.

This is very well written and easy to follow. My required text was from Eisberg/Resnick and I hated it. This book is much better to read from. The problems are not quite as hard, but if you're learning modern physics and have any trouble then read the corresponding chapters or sections from this book and then go back to your required text. It will help make physics fun to learn again.

The book is a long excuse for Masson's personal problems and is interesting only to readers very concerned with Paul Brunton. Masson looks for the worst he can remember about a person, he knew in his youth, and expands on every little word. If I was held accountable for every stupid word and phrase I have myself uttered (and the book is littered with that stuff) then my sisters could have me declared insane. Paul Brunton affected many people and engaged many readers, but to require him to be absolutely right all the time would be to ask for Buddha combined with Jesus. The book makes Masson sound childish and preoccupied with himself. The destroyed childhood, he describes, to me sounds like and extremely privileged situation where several adults deeply cared and paid attention to a pretty uninteresting kid. Get a grip Masson.

I would give this book a zero if Amazon made such an option available. And I would have quit reading it after the first chapter had my book group not selected it for discussion. (What on earth possessed us to choose this book, I cannot say.)

Unless one has a personal interest in Paul Brunton (the guru in question), as do some of the the other Amazon reviewers, the book is boring, superficial and pedestrian. To my mind, the interesting story here is how members of an intelligent, educated, Jewish family suspended their critical faculties and cultural assumptions to became followers of a man who claimed variously to come from another planet and a far off star. But Masson offers no insight - psychological, cultural, religious or other - into the motivations of his father, mother and uncle to reform their lives in supplication to a wacky charlatan. Instead he gives us an event-by-event account of the details of life with Brunton, told in the mind-dulling, repetitious prose of a what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation type of essay.

Self-deluded gurus are a dime a dozen. Intelligent, intimate insight into what makes others follow them is not. This book does nothing to disturb that balance.

The only insight you'll get from this book is that the author thinks quite highly of himself, with no demonstrable evidence to support the conclusion. I got my copy from the library, and though it was overpriced at that.

Jeffrey Masson recounts his experiences growing up with a family under the direction of self-appointed Guru and misdirected(-ing?) "Eastern Star" Paul Brunton. Masson makes no attempt to hide the illusions he and his parents and sister were held by, telling how "P.B." (Paul Brunton) was able to hold sway over his impressionable if well to do and world traveled, educated parents while himself undergoing no scrutiny. Indeed, I found this book to be a blueprint for many families that have chosen to drop everything, and seek "spiritual improvement" from an outside source. It seems so much easier sometimes to get all of the answers from the source, a teacher or minister, rather than be truely introspective and fix the very real personality problems and faults we all have.

Masson unflinchingly includes excerpts from his younger years, when he was convinced he was on a higher spiritual plane than most of his fellow beings. The arrogance and naivete of his youth is humorous if somewhat worrisome, though we find that he is gifted with a humble introspection that allowed him to outgrow the worst of these. He also explains how over the years through his own education he came to find that most of Brunton's teachings were manufactured or misquoted, the man he'd once so admired didn't know the difference between Sanskrit and Hindi, and certainly was confused as to the texts he supposedly had mastered. Perhaps most interesting, Masson documents his years at Harvard when he has the opportunity to meet other "spiritual" minds in the orientalist religious movements, and discover that supposedly great spiritual men like Alan Watts and Edward Conze were hardly above treating their own families with disregard and cruelty (see page 160). Slowly Masson comes to take critical account of what the "spiritual masters" around him, including family guru Paul Brunton, lack--compassion and a base in reality is traded for the freedom of power over others. Paul Brunton is humiliatingly debunked by the newly savvy Masson upon his return from college--a lesson in developing critical thinking skills and overcoming pithy know-it-all canned "spiritualism" for all of us, written in a thoughtful and reflective manner. Why after all, do the "spiritually developed" so crave the "Maya" of worldly recognition and devotion? Masson is critical too of his old self, and closes on a gentle note.

If you want a complete history of the Microsoft operating system, this is the book for you. It also gives a overview of the system and can help you see how the parts are connected. Unfortanetly, it seems to be written for someone who is upgrading from DOS V.1. The authors seem most concerned with getting old DOS programs and old hardware to work in Windows 98 and assume that anyone with new components and windows programs will never have a problem. This is not true!

The book assumes you are already familier with the old diagnostic tools. For example, it tells you that the untility Dr Watson is much improved but only hints at what the utility does and gives no instruction for using it. (you will not find Dr Watson on the start menu so new users will not be able to even open it.)

I bought the book mainly because I have a software problem with my new computer. This book told me about starting in safe mode and went on to say that if that did not work the problem could be very difficult to track down. Thank you Mr Norton.

Fortanetly.

Despite the fact that Millenium and Win2K have been released, for support folks the version of Windows we most often encounter is still Win98. This book has just about everything you need to know about Windows 98 right there between the covers.

Unlike one of the other previous reviewers, I found the background and theory portions of the book to be incredibly useful in figuring out just what has gotten out of whack with a system that is giving me fits. The explanations of memory usage, peripheral drivers, and FAT32 should be required reading for anyone who does more than word processing on their computer.

The plus of buying this book is that you get a lot of useful information. There were few questions that I couldn't answer by reading a bit. I found that the information was much better organized than the Microsoft documentation and more complete as well.

In addition, the author provides really good productivity tips that have made working with Windows a pleasant experience. I usually don't have a lot of time to waste getting things done, so anything that helps me work more efficiently is welcome.

The big negative for this book is that the author spends a lot of time discussing theory. He'll talk about how things work for pages at a time. While this is OK if you have a lot of time to read, it's time consuming to dig through pages of theory to find the one piece of useful information you need. I did find the theory useful, so I can't say the author was completely wrong in adding it to the book, I just wish all of the theory had been included in separate sections so I could ignore it.

I gave the book five stars because it is an essential reference despite the organizational flaws. Any book that can fix as many problems as this one can deserves high marks. Perhaps the author will include less theory the next time around.

This book is just a copy of JMS tutorials from java site and has examples which are written using jmq which is no longer available as it has now become part of iPlanet group and they have broken compatibility (Interfaces have been changed) Not the worst book but certainly worst wrox book i have ever read

This book covers a lot of ground about JMS. However, the problem is that it is written by many authors, which results in repetition of some subject, bad structure of the book and more pages than necessary for explaining the subjects.

The first 5 chapters are on 250 pages and cover the basic about JMS, but I think "Java Message Service" by Monson-Haefel does a better job here. However, I appreciate that there are sequence diagrams in the first chapter that shows basic design patterns for MOM-based applications. The next two chapters is code example that shows how to use JMS from a web application and from EJBs. I'm not too found about this kind of lengthy code examples.

The chapter about JMS and Clustering is very technical, but still only scratches the surface. This is a subject that needs an own book to be covered completely. The next chapter called "Distributed Logging Using JMS" is again a lengthy code example, but a very useful one!

Chapter 10 is about XML Messaging with some XML code example. I think this chapter, like some of the other chapters as well, covers too little to be of some real value and too much for just being an overview. Chapter 11 is about Mobile Applications and the criticism against this chapter is the same as the chapter about XML.

All and all this is a book that covers a lot of subjects related to JMS, but it does it in a boring and verbose way.

I expect that with introduction of JMS and Message Driven Beans which are based on this technology we will see very big movement towards implementing various application scenarious based on JMS. This book definitely could help you to decide what should be taken in account. I also like chapter on Clustering and Scalability - each enterprise (and you as developer for this enterprise) should think about this during design stage. List of various JMS providers (SonicMQ, IBM MQ Series, FioranoMQ, WebLogic) and implemented by them features could also be helpful.

no useful information. a total waste of time & money. Even the Cisco Remote Access book had more information than this! Too bad you can't return ebooks. The Adobe Acrobat reader is quirky sometimes it works sometimes not on Windows XP Platform. Placed my order & waited over 2 hours before I could download it. I was told they were doing server maintenance when I placed my order. But there was no notice to that effect on the web site.

Just bought Cisco IOS 12.0 Dial Solutions. It's 1800+ pages. Hopefully some good stuff in there.

This book contains no really usefull information for ISDN configurations on Cisco routers. A real waste of time.

Do you know what NT1, TEI, 2B+D, 23B+D, 30B+D mean? What are the similiarities between Frame Relay and ATM? Great DDR config examples, the type that stomp you on the "Building Cisco Remote Access Networks" examination. What is the difference between PAP and CHAP? I downloaded some of the router configurations to get more practice. Because when your dealing with a Cisco exam don't leave any thing to chance, it'll bite you later.

I also recommend purchasing "ISDN", isbn:0-07-034437-X author:Gary Kessler

This is a terribly disappointing book. After reading and hating MacLuhan's "Understanding Media", I was hoping his disciple would straighten at least some of the intellectual abuses committed by his master. Not so in the least. The disciple, still overwhelmed by the friendship granted him when he was a young graduate student, by the great guru, seems incapable of objective thinking. Is this a case of puppy love? But, more concretely, I would like to know what is NOT a medium in this bizarre quasi-religion of the digital. Even windows fall under this category(Cf. p. 179: "We invented windows...as an improvement upon the poor choice of walls with no vision or walls with holes and no warmth..."). It is this pseudo-analysis that plagues this book, as well as the books of the great white chief. And, if you happen to reject all these facile generalizations, then you are a fool, or you haven't understood the "profundities" in question. In the same way, Marxists accuse their critics of suffering from false consciousness due to their class origin, and Freudian affirm that the rejection is caused by repressed emotions. One has to be a Marxist to understand Marx, and a psychoanalyst to understand Freud. In the same way, only people who are convinced of the truth in MacLuhan's all-explaining ideas to be able to truly understand the genius. And when the author of the present books affirms that "Tom Wolfe...'aptly' compared (MacLuhan) to Darwin, Einstein and Freud", the expression that comes to mind is "Cult of Personality". Why argue with true believers?

inherent to the impact of mcluhan's metaphors, which explore more so than explain, a generation of academics found it necessary to use them as a vehicle for their own opinions. levinson practices the same. in an attempt to validate his own theories he continuously disgresses with anecdotes about how great mcluhan was in all his aspects. with this i do not criticize mcluhan's theories but aim my arrows at the banality of levinson's book. in the midst of what could possibly considered academic discourse he bothers with: "marshall and eric had been at our home for dinner 1978 - tina afterwards named that pot roast recipe the "mcluhan pot roast" - and tina and i had wonderful dinners with corinne and marshall at their home in wychwood park several times. we always keenly regretted - and still do - that marshall did not live to meet our children. (pg 137) it is exactly this kind of utter nonsense that annoyed me most. i understand that scientific output has to be validated to a certain extent by building upon the theories of others, but i don't think this mcluhan-mania is relevant. since levinson has no scrupules about this technique the book is distracting throughout. it is his style that tries to invite you to the cosy comfortable good old days when mcluhan was having dinner with the author that should not have made it past its final edit. as for the rudiments of the content it provides an interesting point of view of looking at new (digital) media. other than that it is one of the worst books i have ever read (seldom have i seen someone refer to his previous works as much as this fellow). knowing postman and the larger part of the nyu media ecology department i am afraid that this book might be indicative of academic in-breed. everyone is so busy liking everybody else that there seems no room for genuine criticism. levinson tries to falsify some of mcluhan's critics by saying that they "didn't understand". this is testimony to a state of mind that, apart from being arrogant, will not provide you with more nore refreshing insights, as much as it provides more of the same. and here i sit thinking that academic discourse was suppposed to be dynamic and not static. silly me, it seems.

The author worked with McLuhan at the end of the 1970s and here explains the public's fascination with and perceptions of McLuhan and his theories. Chapters provide modern links between these theories and the experiences of the computer world in modern times, developed after he died in 1980. Essential for any who would apply McLuhan's perspective to modern times.

As someone involved in the consulting area for many years, I was unable to find any new idea that would make worthwhile to spend money in this book. Almost everything that is mentioned here can be grabbed from free articles availables in Internet,about this subject. Additionally, there are a good number of books that will help you much more to plan and implement ERP's. Last, but not least, the book only have a handful of small pictures and tables. Unacceptable for a modern book about business and technology topics.

This book provides a high-level overview of many of the issues surrounding an ERP implementation. However, the coverage is superficial and repetitive. I think a 10-page summary of this material would be much more useful than this 200-page book. Often I felt like the book was more of an advertisement for a consulting company than a serious treatment of the issues involved in implementing an ERP system. Still, it may help one who is inexperienced in this area to know some of the important questions to ask before and during the implementation.

This book is a good overview of all of the issues related to the selection and implementation of enterprise systems. I have purchased several copies of the book and distributed them to potential clients. I use the book as a gift during my seminars.

The book, however, does not go into a lot of details on such critical issues such as change management and business case development for the project.

This is a good introduction book and is an easy read. I recommend it for readers who want to understand the issues of ERP at a high level.